The UK House of Commons passed the Gender Recognition Bill by a majority of 355 votes to 46 at 7.11pm on Tuesday 25 May 2004. Having already been debated by the House of Lords, the new and virtually unamended legislation completed the remaining formalities quickly and received Royal Assent on 1 July 2004 (Burns, 2014: Foreword) The following spring, in April 2005, the new Act of Parliament came into full effect and several thousand British transsexual women and men began applying for legal recognition of their acquired gender.Women became recognised as women, men as men – for all purposes in UK law. Successful applicants received replacement birth certificates to protect their privacy, and it became an offence for officials learning about a transsexual person’s gender reassignment history to disclose that to a third party without consent (except in specifically defined instances). It also became possible for transsexual women to marry men (or enter a Civil Partnership with another woman) and vice versa for transsexual men. The new law provided a resolution to a nightmare that transsexual people had contended with for 34 years. While not the first law to be changed by their activism, the new Act was the prize that trans campaigners had fought to obtain for more than a dozen. And yet the most remarkable thing was that the whole legislative process had taken place with so little discourse in the conventional media-hosted sense. The reasons for that will become plain in this account.But first some background … British transsexual people had experienced serious problems with the official view of their gender for 34 years.
Social policy is often constructed and implemented by people who have little experience of its impact as a service user, but there has been a growing interest in greater public, patient and service user involvement in social policy as both political activity and academic discipline.Social Policy First Hand is the first comprehensive international social policy text from a participatory perspective and presents a new service user-led social policy that addresses the current challenges in welfare provision.A companion volume to Peter Beresford’s bestselling All our welfare, it introduces the voices of different groups of service users, starting from their lived experience. With an impressive list of contributors, this important volume fills a gap in looking at social policy using participatory and inclusive approaches and the use of experiential knowledge in its construction. It will challenge traditional state and market-led approaches to welfare.Social Policy First Hand is the first comprehensive international social policy text from a participatory perspective and presents a new service user-led social policy that addresses the current challenges in welfare provision.